The reason I say this is that the only sure way to keep a bomber out of a building or an area is to set up gates on all the entry points and search the people or vehicles coming in. There are many ways of doing this and it is not rocket science to keep the people inside totally safe from a suicide bomb attack if you check everyone trying to get in.
What is slightly more difficult is keeping the poor sods doing the searching alive because a suicide bomber who is stopped for a search and prevented from reaching his goal knows he will not be able to escape and is very likely to take out the people doing the stopping if he possibly can. Better to kill a few unbelieving soldiers than no one at all. Staying alive while stopping bombers entering a secure area does take proper planning and organization, and may require you to be a little ruthless to stay alive yourself. That is what we are going to look at now.
Depending on where you are working there may be different rules of engagement. What this amounts to is that the politicians may prefer that you take more risks and stop you shooting potential bombers to make the politicians look good; or you may have the freedom to shoot anyone who comes too close and doesn’t look right. Depends on your politicians.
Two suicide bombers attacked a bus carrying Afghan Army soldiers on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, killing six soldiers on 19 December 2010. Suicide bombers will continue to play a role in the war in Afghanistan so be vigilant. (Corbis)
For propaganda purposes the bad guys may also send non-bombers – women and children – to act suspicious, get too close and perhaps get themselves shot to make you feel bad and lay off before sending in the real bomber. Wise up to this tactic and don’t let it happen.
The two main types of suicide bomber you might have to contend with, the walking bomb where a pedestrian carries a load of explosive on his body and the motorized bomb where the bomber drives his vehicle packed with explosive into the target area before detonation, both demand very similar defence techniques. The difference with vehicle bombs, of course, is that they tend to be much bigger, so they don’t have to get quite so close to do damage, and they usually have to stay on the road.
I will cover walking bombs first as most of the concepts apply also to vehicle bombs, then I will cover a few principles which apply just to vehicles. Like almost everything else in this book, it is mix and match. Get the principles inside your head, keep your wits about you and use what serves.
Walking bomb defence
Control entry: The first, last and only step which will prevent an effective suicide bombing mission is to control access to the area which is at risk from attack. Put a ring of steel around it. You will understand that there are huge numbers of such targets in every city and they cannot all be defended. Areas to be secured could be single buildings with access control points or the whole of a town centre with a fence around it. But that is not your worry; there are people way over your pay grade whose job it is to decide which targets are so important that they set you to defending them.
REMEMBER:
When the insurgent knows you are searching every single person going into a certain area then they will not send in a bomber as the mission is bound to fail in its primary intent and only kill a guard or two. If you only search every third person the bomber’s handler may take the chance. So make sure you search everyone OK?
To stop any and every bomber you just throw a cordon of some kind around the area with guards on the entry points and search every single person trying to enter. Often these points are access doors to a building but they can just as easily be gates in a wired off market area. Once the cordon is up the people inside are safe from suicide bombers. So long as you make sure no one tunnels in.
A monkey can find a bomb on anyone passing through a checkpoint and prevent it killing the people inside the target. Unfortunately, that monkey is going to be the target of last resort for the bomber and, worst of all, that monkey is going to be you. The remainder of this chapter, therefore, is not so much about how you stop suicide bombers, you know that already, it is about how you stop suicide bombers and stay alive yourself.
Keep everyone away from your checkpoint: So what can you do to stay alive while preventing a suicide bomber gaining access to the area you are securing? The guiding principle behind dealing with all suicide bombers is to keep the people and vehicles too far away to kill you until you know they are not trying. How do you do that?
The ideal is to have people form a queue some distance away from your Search Point. This can be achieved quite easily using razor wire to force people into a line – similar to the way banks do in the West – though most banks use shiny little posts and cheerfully coloured ropes rather than razor wire. At the head of the queue should be a line on the floor, called a ‘kill line’, and a sign in a suitable language telling visitors that if they pass the line without being called they will be shot. Close to this position you should site an electronic sniffer to pick up explosives and a body scanner and video camera if you can get them. It is very difficult to make or carry explosives without getting some trace of the scent on you and this will catch almost all bombers and a few bad guys who have been handling explosive too. The civilians don’t have to know about the body scanner which will show anything they have stuffed inside themselves. Anyone with bulky clothes can be asked to open up for the camera.
The gun and search teams will be sufficiently protected to withstand any explosion occurring behind the kill line. From behind the safety of the kill line people are told by the gun or search team to advance one at a time to a Search Position shielded from the queue by blast walls. If anyone advancing looks suspicious or bulky then have them open their clothes before approaching the search area. Because anyone trying to rush the Search Position from the kill line will be shot by the gun team the only weapons reaching this point should be possibly small knives – and the Search Team do have weapons and full body armour. When a person is cleared here they are allowed to advance past the kill line and enter the secure area.
About the best thing you can do when you have to do physical searches is make the visitor stand with their arms away from their body so they cannot trigger a bomb so easily. Then have the searcher approach the visitor from the side while a marksman aims at the visitor’s head with orders to shoot if they make any sudden movements. This might just prevent a bomber triggering the detonation.
It may be the case that you are prevented by someone who ‘flies a desk’ from dealing with the situation as safely I am showing here on account of upsetting the locals or his boss’ voters. You may even have to send someone forward to do the search. In this case draw straws for ‘point’ and change over at intervals to give everyone a fair crack at finding a bomber the hard way.
It is not a bad idea to set up your coral in such a way that an approaching bomber is not trapped in a queue before he can see how carefully you check everyone. This way he may just go away and trouble someone else. Better still, you might give anyone leaving the queue a careful once-over.
Vehicle bomb defence
The guiding principle behind dealing with vehicle bombs is also to keep them at a distance. The problem is that a truck can carry so much explosive that it doesn’t have to get very close to you or the target to do a lot of damage. It also takes some stopping. If you stop a vehicle bomb personally at a check point you are almost certainly going to die and there is nothing you can do other than go to mass regularly or carry a lucky rabbit’s foot. In the accompanying diagram, the distances between each station should be as great as the area allows.